OK, maybe the title's mostly from NPH killing Aerosmith's classic (and probably my favorite song ever). Still, I think it sums up the Sox pretty damn well. And, since this is a dual-purpose baseball/politics blog, the Dems. But I'll focus on the Sox for at least the first paragraph or four.
A great deal's been written about the "Pink Hat" phenomenon; that is, the prevalence at the ballpark of "Red Sox fans" who couldn't pick Carl Yastzremski out of a lineup or who think (I swear this actually came up on blogs) that Alex Gonzalez was the "greatest shortstop in Sox history." I have two big problems with this outcry. The first is just that bandwagons are a price of success, and one I'm willing to pay. The second, and more important, is that "Pink Hat" mostly applies to female fans, and that's not cool. There's absolutely no shortage of male bandwagon-jumpers, and just playing the percentages of "guys are required societally to like sports and girlfriends are considered awesome if they play along," it truly sucks to use women as the object of annoyance there.
Regardless. I won't claim true hardship as a Sox fan. I was born in 1983. So I missed Slaughter beating Pesky's throw, Gibson destroying the Impossible Dream, Lee tossing an eephus to Tony Perez, and Bucky Fucking Dent (it's a blog, I don't need asterisks, ha ha). And I was a toddler barely adjusting to "wait, what do you mean I've got a sister" when Mookie hit that grounder to Billy Buck. So there's a lot of shit I missed.
On the other hand, my first baseball memory is watching Dave Stewart eviscerate the Sox in 1990. I saw Mo Vaughn on that goddamn horse in '95, watched the Sox kill the Indians in Game 1 in 1998, then drop the three non-Pedro starts. 1999... more Pedro heroics, then a complete collapse in the face of the Yanks. The sad self-destruction of the late Harrington-Duquette Sox, with Carl Everett going nuts and Jimy Williams getting canned (on my 18th birthday! Hooray adulthood!) And all of that, leading to the 2003 ALCS, the end of which frankly would serve as an entirely acquittable defense for the murder of Grady Little by any resident of New England.
So yeah, it's a bit annoying when I'm at Fenway surrounded by 19-year-olds in Ellsbury jerseys who don't quite understand the whole "three strikes and you're out" concept. I've never hated being at Fenway before, but I did on Patriot's Day this year, when the Sox were getting annihilated by the Rays (and I remember when they were the Devil Rays, and SUCKED, which none of the Ellsburys can say) and the seven rows around us only cared that the kiosks would stop selling $7 Budweiser in the 7th.
But I reassure myself with the knowledge that they can't appreciate a Sox win the way I do. There's just no way. To watch everything that unfolded between Millar's walk and Stewart's steal and that bouncing grounder from Renteria to Keith Foulke... Ask any true Red Sox fan how they spent that week, and you will hear some tales. Lack of sleep, sitting in the same position for hours so as not to curse our boys, going to work and/or school in a complete daze having watched the game till 2 am... It was a frigging gauntlet. And we came out the other side with the pennant that eluded every Sox team for nine decades prior. That 9th-inning toss from Foulke to Minky, the same toss that happens in a hundred games a year; it killed a century of demons. And if you were in New England and truly watching, you could feel them die. There was actually a whisper in the air.
So when Tony Massarotti and Dan Shaughnessy start screaming that the 2010 Sox, with their newfangled stats and oddly ineffective Josh Beckett, are doomed to failure, I can take the long view. The baseball team I live and die with is not exactly playing its finest baseball right now. But the players involved are better than this, and there's four more months in the season. And if they don't happen to win the Series this year, then you know what? That'll suck. But they'll still have a Beckett-Lester-Buchholz-Lackey rotation going into next year (and the three after that), and an almost unfair farm system feeding new guys in. The Sox have a lot of season left, and a lot of seasons ahead. I'm only 26, I've got plenty of time to watch them.
21-20? All that means is they need to go 74-47 to win 95 and make the playoffs. Easy. Go Sox.
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